Ludger nodded slowly. That confirmed something else too. The labyrinth wasn’t merely dangerous.
It was economically elegant. Monsters with armed forms, defensive pressure, breach risk, and a resource that fed high-value manufacturing rather than low-grade bulk trade.
Useful. Very useful.
Elira watched him gather another ring and said, a little more carefully now, “You’re evaluating us.”
“Yes.”
“Mother was right, then.”
“She usually is?”
Elira gave him a dry look. “Annoyingly often.”
For the first time in a while, Ludger almost smiled. Almost. Then he looked at the ring again, feeling the faint mana in the metal. No wonder this guild mattered. And no wonder an alliance here had real weight. Elira gave a small shrug and brushed a bit of dust off her sleeve before continuing her explanation.
“We can make a lot of money with the silver,” she said, “at least in theory.”
Ludger looked at her.
“In practice,” she went on, “reaching this far consistently is the problem.”
She gestured toward the shattered remains around them.
“These things don’t die easily, and weapons don’t last long against them. Even silver-treated ones get damaged fast if the user isn’t strong enough. The harder variants deeper in make it worse.” Her expression shifted into the dry sort of annoyance that probably came from hearing the same problem repeated in reports too many times. “We also don’t have many magic users. Not enough to make the deeper harvest efficient.”
That made sense. A labyrinth like this clearly punished straightforward delving.
Elira continued, “And using too many potions to brute-force the process would be pointless. By the time you factor in the cost of recovery, mana replenishment, repairs, and replacement gear, the gains drop to almost nothing.”
Ludger crossed his arms.
That lined up neatly with what he had seen so far. The labyrinth had value, but not easy value. It wasn’t the kind of place you could throw ordinary delvers at and expect steady returns. The monsters were too hard, too armed, too structured, and too costly to grind through inefficiently.
As he was thinking that, his eyes moved downward and caught something faint under Elira’s boots. A thin layer of frost.
No… Not just frost. Ice. Very controlled, very slight, forming and fading in careful patterns beneath her feet as if the air itself had condensed into smooth support for an instant and then stabilized.
Ludger looked at it, then at her. Elira noticed immediately.
“This is my magic,” she said.
Ludger raised a brow.
She smiled a little, clearly pleased that he had caught it. “You run fast,” she said. “But I can fly with this.”
That made him look more closely. Interesting. Not raw ice shaping in the ordinary sense, then. Or at least not only that. Mobility, support, probably aerial repositioning, maybe sustained movement over broken terrain if her control was good enough.
Ludger looked away from the ice and said, “You’ve seen what you wanted.”
Elira shrugged.
“Watching you solo the guardian would be even more interesting.”
Ludger stared at her for a second.
Elira, entirely undisturbed, continued, “And in case you need to be rescued, I’ll stay around.” She adjusted her glasses lightly. “It would be bad if something happened to a Lionsguard representative inside our labyrinth. That could create problems between guilds.”
Ludger sighed. Of course she had found a way to make it sound reasonable. That was the truly annoying part.
Not that she was persistent. He had already noticed that. It was that her persistence kept dressing itself in just enough logic to become inconvenient to argue against without wasting more time than the argument was worth.
This one really could not take a no for an answer. He missed his guild. There, when he said something, people usually obeyed him. Sort of. Most of the time. At least more than this. Elira lifted both hands slightly in surrender.
“Sorry,” she said. “I won’t do or say anything weird, and I won’t spread anything I see here. Or anything I’ve already seen.” She hesitated only a fraction before adding with complete honesty, “I just really want to watch you fight.”
Ludger looked at her for a moment.
Then he said, “Fine.”
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Elira brightened immediately.
“But,” Ludger added, “you’ll have to explain your magic to me.”
That made her smile widen rather than shrink.
“Fair enough.”
She took a small breath, then shifted into explanation with the same ease as before, except this time there was more personal confidence in it. Less guild talk. More ownership.
“I’m a cryomancer,” she said. “Like my mother.”
Ludger listened. Elira held out one hand, palm up, and the air above it shimmered faintly.
“I don’t just make ice out of nowhere,” she said. “That’s the mistake people make when they hear the word and stop thinking. What I really do is control moisture and temperature.” Her voice sharpened slightly with the pleasure of explaining something she clearly understood well. “I pull moisture from the air, from surfaces, from the environment around me, condense it, then force the temperature down until it crystallizes into ice.”
A thin mist gathered over her palm as she spoke. The temperature around them dropped just slightly. Then the mist tightened. Turned denser.
And became a cluster of clean, narrow ice darts suspended in the air around her hand.
“They look simple,” Elira said, “but the real trick is control. Shape, density, angle, spin, balance, temperature stability…” She moved two fingers and one dart rotated slowly in place, its surface catching the dim light. “If I rush the process, they’re brittle. If I over-condense them, they get heavy and lose speed. If I don’t stabilize the mana properly, they shatter too early.”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly. Useful. Precise. Technical. Elira noticed the interest and continued with a bit more energy.
“My mother is better at broad-area control,” she said. “Cooling the field, reshaping terrain, locking down movement, building heavier constructs. I can do some of that too, but my better side is precision.” She glanced down at the faint ice under her boots. “Mobility too. I form ice under my steps, in the air if needed, and move across it before it collapses or melts. That’s how I keep up.”
So that was the flying. Not true flight in the simple sense. More like continuous aerial footing created faster than normal eyes could follow properly. Elira turned her head slightly toward the deeper part of the corridor.
“Watch.”
She flicked her fingers. The ice darts around her hand spread outward in a smooth arc, floating beside her like waiting birds. Then her posture changed.
Not dramatically. Just enough to show that she was no longer only talking.
Two hundred meters away, farther down the ruined underground street, a few stone revenants were moving through the spaces between pillars. Small from this distance. Barely shapes.
Elira’s eyes focused. The darts trembled once. Then shot forward. They didn’t fly like clumsy projectiles. They screamed.
Thin lines of pale force cut through the corridor with frightening speed, so clean and straight they almost didn’t look real until the impacts came. One revenant’s head burst apart instantly, stone fragments spraying backward. A second lost half its face and collapsed before the body fully understood it had been hit. A third tried to turn too late and got a dart straight through one eye socket, the entire back of the skull cracking open from the force.
All three dropped.
Elira lowered her hand slightly, expression pleased but not smug.
“I learned my sniping from my father,” she said.
Ludger glanced at her.
She gave a small shrug. “He wasn’t a cryomancer. But he was good at ranged fighting. Positioning, patience, angle, timing.” Her gaze returned to the fallen revenants in the distance. “So I mixed that with my mother’s magic.”
That explained a lot.
The style fit her now that he had seen it. Less overwhelming than Maris’ likely approach, but cleaner at range. A fighter built to control space, reposition, and kill precisely from distances where most people would still be deciding whether a target was worth the effort.
Elira looked back at Ludger, pushing her glasses up lightly with one finger.
“So,” she said, “that’s my magic.”
Ludger looked once more at the dead revenants two hundred meters away, then at the last traces of cold mist fading around her hand.
Not bad. Not bad at all. As Elira’s explanation settled, something flickered through Ludger’s awareness.
A familiar pull. A shift in the system. Then the notification came.
Class unlocked: Cryomancer + 8 Intelligence, + 8 Wisdom
Skill unlocked: Cold Manipulation
Ludger’s mouth curved into a faint smirk before he could stop it. Elira noticed immediately.
And frowned.
“That too?” she said.
Ludger glanced at her.
She folded her arms. “The rumors said you had a habit of smirking at the oddest times.” Her eyes narrowed slightly behind her glasses. “I didn’t expect that part to be true.”
Ludger decided not to explain that he had just unlocked a class from listening to her talk. That would only make the conversation longer. So instead, he changed the subject.
“If you can do that much,” he said, nodding toward the distant revenants she had sniped, “then you should be able to offer a lot of support. Or even solo this labyrinth with the right relic.”
Elira shrugged, though there was a trace of annoyance in it.
“Custom-made relics are too expensive,” she said. “And the people who can make proper ones usually work for nobles.”
That made sense. A precise ranged mage with mobility like hers would become much more dangerous with the right equipment. Which was exactly why equipment of that level would be monopolized by people with money, influence, or both.
Ludger looked at her for a second, then said, “Froststeel would work well with your magic.”
Elira blinked.
Then she gave him a dry look. “I can’t exactly use swords with defensive runic effects to enhance my magic.”
Right. Ludger recalled, a bit belatedly, that she didn’t know what he knew.
To most people, the runic swords were the Lionsguard’s known product. The famous one. The thing stories spread around. But the swords were only one expression of the craft, and not even the only one he had already experimented with.
Under his cloak, hidden from sight, were his own runic crossbows. He didn’t touch them. Didn’t reveal them. Just remembered. So it wouldn’t need to be a sword. And it definitely wouldn’t need to be something as clumsy as forcing her into a weapon style that didn’t match her.
A froststeel frame. A lighter relic. A casting aid. Something built for ranged output, cooling efficiency, mana flow, and stability under repeated precision attacks. Something that helped her mobility and sniping instead of getting in the way of both.
Yes. That had possibilities. Interesting ones. Ludger looked at Elira again, expression returning to its usual calm. Perhaps he could engrave something for her later. Not because he particularly wanted to start handing out gifts. But because a useful custom tool would likely make her much more effective… and, ideally, convince her not to bother him quite so much later.
That alone gave the idea real value.